How Discord is helping PR pros build community and reach journalists

If you have a Discord account, odds are good you’re a gamer.

The app reports that 90% of its more than 200 million active users play video games. That’s what it was designed for, after all: the founders wanted a reliable way to chat with their friends while playing games. That has evolved into what Discord is today, an app that combines voice and video chat, livestreaming and text communication that combines features of both chatrooms and old-school message boards.

Discord is not an open social platform where you publicly mix with every other user, like X or TikTok. Instead, the action goes down in servers organized around topics, friend groups or shared interests.

Nick Moran, gaming & esports PR manager at JSA+Partners, likens it to Teams or Slack.

“My personal experience is that it’s actually the main way I keep in touch with a lot of my friends and peers nowadays, and I’ve seen a lot of folks use it the same way,” Moran said. “Given Discord is a bit of a sandbox for communication, it’s evolved to host digital communities, professional networks — even congressional and political communities use it to organize.”

Moran works to promote esports world championships and has found Discord to be a powerful tool for staying in touch with interested journalists — even if they can’t be at the gaming event in person.

“We created a custom Discord server to suit both in-person and remote media requests, lowering the barrier of participation and incentivizing involvement however they could,” Moran explained. “For in-person folks, it served as a hub for updates and media materials. For remote journalists, with voice and video chat, it became an easy way to join interviews, coordinate with on-site partners, and more.”

One big advantage of Discord is its wealth of customization options. For instance, he was able to create separate channels with information available to journalists versus creators based on their interests and needs. Neither group needed to be bothered with irrelevant things, and everyone had what they needed.

That customization also allows for event promotion in more subtle ways. While Discord servers are free to create, using the paid tier, known as Nitro, allows server owners to create customized stickers that can then be used outside the server.

“When I build media or creator servers, I use client assets to sprinkle in customization — like event-related emojis. People use them in other servers, which spreads awareness organically,” Moran explained.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive — largely because Moran’s audience is already on Discord. But others are building communities so powerful, people are willing to download Discord just to be a part of them.

A community of investigators

Bellingcat is a nonprofit collective that creates investigative journalism, though not all its researchers are journalists.

“It’s an organization that focuses on open-source research, which means that we cover international stories only using what we can find online through free and mainly free and publicly available resources,” explained Charley Maher, Bellingcat’s social media editor.

Initially, much of the collaboration for these stories took place on Twitter, as it was known at the time. Founder Eliot Higgins used to puzzle out investigations and hunt for sources on the social network along with his followers through crowdsourcing. But this presented two challenges. First, it could be difficult to organize and collect these conversations, given the nature of the site. And second, Twitter changed as a new emphasis was put on the algorithm and new ownership altered the culture of the site.

“(Discord) gives you the opportunity to create different channels based on different regions, and then you can make miniature forum discussions, forum pages, where people can go into minute detail if they want to,” Maher explained. “But it still upholds certain standards that we want to uphold — Discord has a very strong no-doxing policy on the platform, which really appeals to us in terms of making sure that nothing harmful or of an issue is going to be shared within the server.”

Since its founding in 2020, Bellingcat’s Discord server has grown to more than 37,000 members. Eighty-nine percent of those users have created accounts in the last month, meaning many have downloaded the app just to be a part of this community, Maher said.

They discover the platform in a variety of ways — through a biweekly event discussion, through posts on other social media accounts. Members are also drawn in by Bellingcat Challenges, which ask the internet to solve geolocation mysteries. Discord members work together to unravel these puzzles, and the collaborative nature of Discord draws new members in, who are in turn exposed to Bellingcat’s broader work.

They also tackle real-world mysteries, including finding the identities of both Nazi soldiers and their victims in a World War II-era photo. A historian asked the Discord server for help and, using maps, AI facial recognition tools and more, they were able to identify these men nearly a century later.

“I think it’s a really cool space to be in,” Maher said. “It’s very similar to other message board platforms — it gives you the ability to have a closer connection with your community. But you have to be prepared to have that closer communication and have the resources ready for that.”

The challenges of Discord

Both Maher and Moran said that getting people onto the platform and used to its quirks is one of the biggest challenges of starting a community there.

“The keyword for me is adoption,” Moran said. “The reason it works so well in gaming and eSports is because everyone’s already on the platform … To see adoption in other industries, you’d need that critical mass of Discord usage. It’s easy to make an account, but any barrier of entry might make someone say, ‘Can we just use WhatsApp or email?’”

Maher added that because her audience largely isn’t familiar with Discord when they join, the team often encounters issues with navigation or understanding the platform.

“(We have) newbies coming in and posting in the wrong channel, or not quite reading the rules, causing issues,” she said. “Whereas on X or something, people are more familiar with the format.”

Maher also cautioned that as networks grow, there is an increasing need for moderation. At Bellingcat, a combination of organization team members and volunteers around the world monitor the server round the clock, enforcing rules, cleaning up spam and ensuring it stays a productive place to be.

“I think you need to have robust moderation resources and well-thought-out, enforceable rules, and then your Discord is going to shine,” she said.

Moran encourages people to dip their toes in the water and give Discord a shot.

“I’d encourage folks to just hop in and start playing around with it, and also join some public, well-run communities in areas of personal interest,” he said. “See how those large digital communities function like well-oiled machines.”

Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.